Notes on the Archive
Chi Tran after Timmah Ball
This essay is part of our 2022 collaboration with Cordite poetry review, edited by Bella Li, Cher Tan and Leah Jing McIntosh.
For this series, Liminal commissioned Asian Australian critics to respond to a work of their choice from Cordite’s Archives. As part of this collaboration, Cordite poetry review published 30 new poems by Asian Australian Poets. Read more here.
‘We left the portal quickly concerned that it had ever been made.’
— Timmah Ball, ‘This Light’, 2021
‘Acknowledging that the “truth” in nonfiction writing is tricky and inherently interpretable subtly undermines the rigidity of mainstream publishing where such books must fall into specific categories…’
– Timmah Ball, ‘Where Nonfiction Belongs’, 2022
Archive as a site
The archive is a site of both order and trouble. It could be said that the archive is where history goes to sleep. Where stories of truth and fiction and the ones that sit in between (or outside of), are kept, contained, and ‘assert the wholeness of Time’. (Le Guin, 1974)
The act of archiving is its own kind of science, where its process of building and accumulation requires many hands to touch it.
Prior to the introduction of The Dewey Decimal Classification, books were given permanent shelf locations based on the order of the library’s acquisition.
The system is employed by libraries to bring order to a type of archive. This system introduced the concept of ordering by a book’s relative location and relative index. In the library, numbers are flexible. They may be expanded on as an indication of the specialty of a subject.
If the archive is where history goes to sleep, it may only wake when somebody approaches it with a question. What activates the archive is the motive and intent by the individual looking for a specific piece of information. The relationship we form with the archive gives it purpose and gives it meaning.
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Archive as a verb
In her essay No Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh speaks of the complexity and disorder that exists within and around the archive.
The archive, it must be noted, is also your enabling fiction: it is the thing you say you are doing well before you are actually doing it, and well before you understand what the stakes are of gathering and interpreting it.
To archive as a verb, as an event that happens and continues to happen.
The archive comes in many different structures and arrangements. A library, a word, a rock, a body of water.
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Archive as a river
In his film Mekong Hotel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul rotates between fiction and documentary realism, playing with narrative as a means to explore Thai folklore and the country’s modern history of political unrest. Set in a hotel on the Mekong River at the Thai-Lao border, one scene sees a Thai woman explaining the aftermath of the Laotian Civil War, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees to Thailand. ‘A roster of refugees was made’, she says, ‘each refugee had a record and was given an ID.’ She speaks of feeling jealous of the refugees at the time, and when her friend laughs and asks her why, she says she was young and didn’t have anything to eat. It is unclear whether this is a scripted scene or if I am watching two actors speak candidly, exchanging their histories with each other.
The Mekong River is one of the longest rivers in Asia and the world and is host to a wealth of histories. In an interview with Tate, Vietnamese artist Thảo Nguyên Phan speaks of the river as a site of cultural significance, as well as an archive from which to form new stories, and to seek ‘alternatives of truth’.
Natural and annual flooding in the Mekong delta brings a lot of nutrition and alluvium from the river, to nurture the land. But in recent decades, for agricultural development, a very sophisticated system of dykes are built in order to prevent flood water from coming inside the rice paddies. Over the years, because the land cannot get natural water from the river, it becomes polluted by all of the chemicals and the pesticides that are heavily used for agricultural production.
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Archive as a weapon
In their essay ‘The Haunting of Agent Orange within the Waters of Rivers and Bodies for Vietnamese Australians’, Boi Huyen Ngo contemplates the Vietnamese tradition of believing in ghosts as a means of negotiating the refugee experience. Ngo says,
To take on the perspective of history as a haunting is to understand that time is not linear. It is to dismiss Western ontological perspectives and their dichotomies that divide the past and the present, the living and non-living, the being and non-being. Rather, to exist within a non-linear history of haunting, is to live spectrally (to be both in the past and in the present), to possess a sense of responsibility, knowing that the past shapes the present, and acknowledging that the past, in all its shadowy forms, cannot be buried.
In describing the temporal uncontainability of Agent Orange, Ngo speaks to how ‘it haunts; it insinuates; it multiplies; and then it appears. It becomes visible, materialising in sediments, in water, in bloody and in our mother’s milk… Perhaps we should understand Agent Orange as a haunting, a ghost that comes and goes with human inter-generational experiences and in the environment.’
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Archive as inheritance
Recently, I spoke of how my father and I live in separate worlds, because he has seen war and I haven’t. The cells that make up our DNA and bodies become the sites that give both order and trouble to our being. My cells contain more memories of his than his do of mine.
For many Vietnamese people, our history lives in our bodies, in the air and in the water. We are taught from a young age that stories passed down to us are to be trusted over the stories that are recorded in books, told by people whom we do not know and whose lives the war did not touch.
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Archive as a measure of direction
Part of the role of an artist may involve rooting us in a particular history that at once welcomes and estranges us. While doing this, they may set aside discourse in favour of silence or discretion; looking at what is felt rather than what is said.
When with Ocean Vuong, Björk speaks of the poet or artist or musician as ‘using poetic licence to bring a fluidity between two things, so that things are not stagnant, so they can rotate.’
American artist Diane Severin Nguyen speaks of photographs as ‘such intense condensations. They’re almost like dreamwork.’ Nguyen makes home-made napalm and uses it often in her work. In an essay on Nguyen’s work, writer Todd von Ammon describes how the photographer shuffles history by reproducing an archived weapon and recontextualising it into a visual language:
Mechanically speaking, stress is a measure of direction. It is the force that keeps the form of the object and is not to be confused—not correlated— with strain. Napalm is a common material… a mixture of gasoline and Styrofoam, napalm is like jelly—it holds together via elastic stress. Burning napalm causes the gasoline to combust, leaving behind the residue of caramelized plastic behind. Any delicate structure is filled with stress; disrupt a fragile object and strain occurs. Stress in objects may signal pain within human bodies… In this sense, each photograph has organs whose shared physiological purpose is to decode one another as freely as possible.
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Archive as a form of trust
Western archival science emerged from diplomatics, a scholarly discipline centred on the critical analysis of documents, specifically, historical documents. The archive must be trustworthy. Preservation comes with a responsibility to ensure reliability, integrity, usability.
With the contents of an archive comes gaps, cracks and breaks. What survives history and what doesn’t, what lives on the precipice of an archive, or what lives outside of it.
A rock can outlive history, so long as history does not break the rock.
The archive is unreliable and is often perhaps not as useful as we hope for it to be. For example, we may look at the Western literature canon as an archive presented to us, throughout our coming-of-age, as a series of archetypes.
This time taught me a lot about what I wanted to break through and write against.
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Archive as companion
The archive may not restore us but what constitutes its usefulness is whether or not it is useful to you. And in moments where, as Timmah Ball says, there is ‘nowhere else to go’, the archive is a place we can wander in and out of, so long as we remember that there is still a world outside of it. A world outside of the archive has a different kind of contents, which breathe and experience things with you. Contents which have immediate and enduring sociopolitical effects, and which happen in real time. And, to quote Hannah Black, ‘it’s important to go outside because you feel different when the weather touches you directly and because there are people there.’
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Works Cited
✷ Björk and Ocean Vuong, ‘On Death, Music and Motherhood’, AnOther, 2022.
✷ Boi Huyen Ngo, ‘The Haunting of Agent Orange within the Waters of Rivers and Bodies for Vietnamese Australians’, AJE Vol. 6, 2016/2017.
✷ Hannah Black, ‘Go Outside: Hannah Black’s Year in Review’, Artforum 2020.
✷ Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, (Santa Barbara: Punctum Books, 2018).
✷ Timmah Ball, ‘This Light’, Cordite Poetry Review, 2021.
✷ Timmah Ball, ‘Where Nonfiction Belongs’, Liminal, 2022.
✷ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
Chi Tran is a writer and filmmaker. Her work is heavily influenced by physics, slow cinema, genetic memory, and faith. She has exhibited and published widely, including with ACCA, MAMA, Liquid Architecture, un. magazine, Runway Journal, and LIMINAL. @peaceactress